Currency Conundrum

Would you invest in a currency when the country has been printing money left and right and with exchange controls to make redemption very difficult? That thought crossed my mind as I got an email from Delta telling me what a great holiday idea it would be to gift miles. For a free domestic ticket it would cost about $ 300. But as I have written before they have made mileage redemption difficult even as they issue so many miles through their affinity partners. If I as a 2 million miler have to fight to get award seats, why would I want to gift someone that currency when I could buy them a ticket on JetBlue or Southwest and not to have them go through heartache?

On the flip side, I was re-reading Tom Friedman's The World is Flat. In that generally flattering book on India, he does call Indians "second buyers" - a polite term for frugal buyers. I have long been baffled why Indian services firms like Infosys and Satyam sit on billions of dollars of  market cap and not use that currency to buy western firms and assets. Especially those with established customer relationships. Infosys, for example, has 1/5th of CSC's revenues but twice the market cap. Many of them have made small acquisitions - but rounding errors compared to the value of their currencies. One missed quarter and that currency would devalue quickly anyways.

But then again, I shouldn't talk because I am a currency novice. Most of my assets are in a currency with too much printing going on, and not enough investment in the right things.